Pruden and Krauthammer analyze Obama's 'Soft on Terror' policy

Who says God doesn't have a sense of humor? He granted us exactly what the stupid generation wanted in this past election by elevating the least qualified man evah to the highest office in our land, President Barack Hussein Obama.

What hath God wrought? Could it be our first Muslim president was put into place by the Almighty to allow America to be humbled by the Arab terrorists?

Wesley Pruden of the Washington Times considers the implications for our nation's security the "soft on terror" reputation Obama is busily building with every day in office.

Mr. Obama now turns to jobs, jobs, jobs, and promises to do for job creation what he did for health care reform and what he's doing to protect us from terror catastrophe. Which may not be enough, but he's doing a bang-up job of protecting the rights of terrorists.

The president displayed an unusual array of friends and enemies. He lectured the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, six of whom were seated as a group on the front row, for their decision to uphold the First Amendment as it applies to corporations (which are comprised of individual citizens). No one can remember when a president ever breached manners and protocol in such a breathtaking way. When the president inaccurately asserted that the court had "reversed a century of law," Associate Justice Samuel Alito was captured on camera mouthing the words "not true," which is apparently the judicial way of saying "you lie!" But Mr. Obama is a onetime law professor and it's possible that his lecture was kindly intended to fill in the gaps of the legal knowledge of the learned justices seated before him. Professors are always eager to display what they know, even if what they know isn't so. We should give the president the benefit of the doubt, even if the stoic justices clearly did not.

Eric Holder, his attorney general also seated among house seats, appeared to be having a high old time, laughing and smiling and basking in the synthetic admiration that high government officials are accustomed to. Mr. Holder is the author of the remarkable decision to grant Miranda rights to the man who tried to celebrate Christmas by blowing up an airliner over Detroit. (Who says radical Muslims have no respect for the holidays of other people's religions?)

President Obama boasted of how much better he is at fighting terrorism than George W. was: "In the last year, hundreds of al Qaeda's fighters and affiliates, including many senior leaders, have been captured or killed, far more than in 2008." Since neither the Bush nor the Obama administration has published body counts (that's so Vietnam War), it's a claim that even the Associated Press concedes is impossible to verify.

What is easy to verify is how soft the Obama administration continues to be on terrorists. No waterboarding (not even when a grubby bewhiskered terrorist clearly needs a bath), no harsh questioning. No fair treating such a soldier of Allah like FDR was willing to treat a soldier of the Nazis or a Shinto warrior during World War II.

It's not fashionable in certain circles to notice this, but we can be sure the Obama treatment of terrorists is taken into account in other places. British intelligence officials say that over the past week an "unusually high number" of prospective evil-doers on the airlines' no-fly list have tried to board airliners bound for the United States. As a consequence, the London government has raised the assessment of the terror threat from "severe," which means an attack is reckoned "highly likely," to "critical," which means an attack is "imminent."

The London Daily Mirror quotes British security sources that an Egyptian man tried to board an American Airlines flight last weekend in London bound for Miami. The next day a Saudi man tried to board a United Airlines flight from London to Chicago. They were sent home.

All this is enough to give Americans nightmares, particularly when it's not at all clear that the high officials of the government are taking the threat as seriously as we expect them to. When Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, told Congress that it was a mistake that FBI field agents, and not specially trained interrogators (but not waterboarders), had questioned the Detroit bomber, he retreated later in the day to say his remarks were "misconstrued." Since so much Washington talk is electronically recorded now, government officials who blurt out inconvenient truths no longer have the luxury of saying they were "misquoted." Bureaucracy has become a dangerous game.

Sir Charles Krauthammer cuts to the bone, as usual, with his analysis of Obama's terror policy.

WASHINGTON -- The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane -- that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration -- but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.

After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed and dispatched him.

We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI).

The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally but unaccountably. Obama's own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration's new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

Perhaps you hadn't heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.

Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had only been conceived for use abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil?

It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist After a year! I suppose this administration was so busy deploying scores of the country's best lawyerly minds on finding the most rapid way to release Gitmo miscreants that it could not be bothered to establish a single operational HIG team to interrogate at-large miscreants with actionable intelligence that might save American lives.

Now, don't you feel better about our security since Obama's policies are clearly explained by the eminent pair of Pruden and Krauthammer? Me neither. But it sure brings clarity to the mind, somewhat like Samuel Johnson said the prospect of a hanging in the morning will do.

And it's our nation that's hanging in the balance. Come on 2012, we may not survive until then.

Ignoble Obama, Chuck's God & Guns, and Hannah the Hooker

Welcome to Tuesday, another wonderful day in Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood as I head off to work at the local hangout for Gun Nutz 'R' Us, also known as the gun shop. Don't you just hate cheerful people in the morning?

Let me start your day off with some words of wisdom from Wesley Pruden, editor emeritus at The Washington Times, the only real newspaper left standing in our nation's capital. Wesley takes at look at President Obama's 'Ignoble Prize.'

Pity Barack Obama. The last thing he needs is another comparison to Jimmy Carter. He could survive the endorsements of his Nobel Prize by Fidel Castro ("a positive measure"), from Dmitry Medvedev, the president of Russia ("evidence of a realistic vision"), or even from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, aspiring Jew-killer and president of Iran ("bringing justice to the world order").

He's got enough with Jimmy Carter already. Mr. Jimmy called the president's prize "a positive development." But celebrating weakness in the face of a challenge and bowing to bullies in an abject hope that the bully will go easy will always turn a real man's stomach. It's the celebration of weakness that's so infuriating. The anger is not about Mr. Obama. Not yet. He hasn't done anything...

The Nobel panel's great expectations are not unrealistic, and the panelists, who made their selection shortly after Mr. Obama was inaugurated president of the United States (not president of the world, as the Europeans suppose), have no reason to be disappointed. His apology tour to the Middle East, his bow to the king of Saudi Arabia, his dithering with Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his blowing off Poland and the Czech Republic over missile bases to appease the Russians have already redeemed the bet the Norwegians put down on the American president.

The Alfred E. Neuman ("What? Me Worry?") strategy for dealing with despots, which is always the default strategy of the Europeans, inevitably leads to rape, regrets and ruin. The Nobel jury wouldn't have to look far for a caution. Norway tried to appease the Nazis, twice declaring itself neutral shortly before the outbreak of World War II. The Nazis invaded anyway, sending the royal family fleeing to London. Many Norwegians fought bravely in the resistance, but the most memorable Norwegian figure of the war was the infamous Vidkun Quisling, the head of a puppet government whose name became a synonym for traitor.

Nevertheless, appeasement is admired by the Nobel juries. FDR never got a Nobel Peace Prize. Neither did Harry Truman or Winston Churchill. Ditto Ronald Reagan. But Yasser Arafat won in 1994. And of course Mr. Jimmy in 2002. Few Americans, beyond those hopelessly in thrall of the politically correct, are any longer surprised by the silliness of the Nobel Peace Prize juries.

Now let's move on to a genuine American hero, one of those who really deserve a Nobel prize but will never get one, Chuck Norris, who writes about two of my favorite topics, God and guns.

Chuck's Code (Freedom):

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Lynyrd Skynyrd, a legendary Southern rock band, put it well in the title track of their new album, "God and Guns":

"God and guns

Keep us strong.

That's what this country

Was founded on.

Well, we might as well give up and run

If we let them take our God and guns."

And let's close with two more of my favorite people, actually three. Mike Adams writes about a visit with his friend Doug Giles and recalls that first meeting with Doug's daughter, Hannah. You may have heard her name before. She's the famous "hooker" who fried ACORN's taxpayer scam.

Hannah, while she was jogging, decided it would be interesting to dress as a hooker and go into an ACORN office seeking help in furthering a prostitution ring. She got her friend James O’Keefe to play the role of a pimp and go in with her. In the end, they went into several ACORN offices to see whether ACORN would give them money, which comes from taxpayers, to further a criminal enterprise.

The sting worked like a charm. The pair caught ACORN – on film, mind you – giving advice on how to set up a prostitution ring and funnel money into a congressional campaign fund. ACORN workers were even willing to help with the money laundering scheme after they heard of their plan to bring under-aged sex slaves into the illegal enterprise.

Hannah and James went public with the tapes. They have been on national television shows and have almost completely destroyed ACORN’s credibility. ACORN is no longer working on the U.S. Census. And they are on the verge of losing all government support in the form of taxpayer funding.

But, just like a wild hog after it has been shot, the pigs that run ACORN are fighting to the death. And, for a time, they will be more dangerous than ever before. They’ve sued Hannah Giles arguing that their rights to privacy have been violated. Their position is simple:

“We at ACORN are the real victims. We have a right to unlimited taxpayer support. Our former lawyer, Barack Obama, is the President of the United States. We have a right to spend public money without fear of public exposure. We’ll even conspire to allow your taxpayer dollars to fund child prostitution. And you will say nothing about it. Or else we will sue.”

In other words, ACORN is trying to turn America into a third world nation. But you can stop them by helping to defend Hannah Giles. Contribute to her cause www.DefendHannah.com and, together, we can destroy ACORN permanently. And we can toss the carcasses of these swine upon the ash heap of history. And we can forever stop them from feeding at the government trough.

As Hannibal Smith used to say, don't you love it when a plan comes together? Let's help Hannah fry ACORN's taxpayer scam permanently.

Biden disappears to V.P. bunker at 'undisclosed location'

Pay no attention to that strange-looking guy with the bushy eyebrows and the comb-over. It's only Joe, formerly known as the Vice President of the United States. And I predict you won't be seeing Joe in public for a while. Former V.P. Dick Cheney's "undisclosed location" now has a new V.P. in occupancy and Obama has the key in his pocket and Secret Service guards at the door.

Joe Biden's latest foot-in-mouth-disease eruption is his remarks about the swine flu, which meet the standard for a genuine political gaffe: It's when a politician accidentally tells the truth. He said all Americans ought to avoid public transportation. Oops. He missed the briefing from Team Obama about how to spread panic without mentioning trains, planes and buses, which of course are all beloved to leftwingnuts everywhere as "public transportation." (Which is what all Americans should be riding instead of the gas guzzling automobiles every single member of Team Obama drives every day. "Do as we say, not as we do" is the Team Obama motto.)

The White House scrambled Thursday to tell Americans to pay no attention to the advice of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who said he's told family members not to travel in subways or airplanes to avoid catching the swine flu.

The latest gaffe from the vice president directly contradicted President Obama, who Wednesday evening had told Americans not to panic or overreact, and instead to take simple measures such as washing hands to combat the flu outbreak.

"I would tell members of my family - and I have - I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now," Mr. Biden told NBC's "Today" show as he earnestly explained how he is handling the flu situation himself.

Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden peeks behind the curtain and translates for us what the Wizard of Odd is really doing while scaring the public to death about pandemics.

At midmorning, President Obama, jealous of his constitutional prerogative as the panic-spreader in chief, sent his press agent out to rewrite what good old Joe had said. "The advice [the vice president] is giving is the same advice the administration is giving to all Americans, that they should avoid unnecessary air travel to and from Mexico."

That's not at all what good old Joe had said, but this was good spinning practice. Over the next few weeks, the president and all the president's men will be trying to take back a lot of the stuff they're saying to punch up the panic over the disease formerly known as swine flu.

After several days of crying that the end is near, the White House finally came up with a celebrity victim, a presidential aide who had traveled to Mexico with the president a fortnight ago and started coughing when he got home. He didn't actually get very sick; this flu so far is mild stuff and the aide is already back at work. There was no need to worry about the president himself; he has no symptoms. Besides, even if he dies he'll only be gone for three days.

The Great Disease Formerly Known as the Swine Flu Pandemic of Aught-Nine is convenient for a lot of folks. The panic focuses everybody's attention on the glory of the government, and impresses the easily impressed that only the feds can stop a pandemic in its tracks, just as easily as it can take over the banking system, assume control of what's left of the American automobile industry, restore international bonhomie (surely you've noticed) and "reform" the health system so that health will be carefully rationed and your doctor will be mentored by your postman on how to deliver efficient government services.

Now, don't you feel better? Swine flu is not a threat, but Obama's "cure" for our nation is.

Understanding Obama's Anti-American Tour of Latin America

If you don't read Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden's twice-weekly columns, you're missing one of the sharpest minds in the news business, though that is faint praise these days. Pruden's analysis today is about Obama's current Anti-American Tour in Latin America, where Pruden says The insults were only for America.

Only Barack Obama knows what's in his heart, but there's the possibility, not heretofore considered by his critics, that the blundering loose tongue he packs with his teleprompter, scorning the dignity and good name of his country for the cheap applause of tin-pot dictators eager to throw rotten bananas at their betters, comes easy and naturally to him.

This wouldn't be one of Dr. Freud's difficult cases. He was born to a mother obsessed with the pursuit of inappropriate men who would treat her badly, abandoned by his father from Kenya, uprooted again from life with a stepfather in Indonesia and ultimately raised by a grandmother he would later publicly scold for her presumed racial bigotry. Why wouldn't he feverishly pursue sanction and esteem, however mindless much of it would be, wherever he could find it?

Only a man with a screwed-up psyche, the likes of which we've probably never had in the White House before, would fly off to foreign shores to campaign against his predecessor and to offer abject apologies to anyone listening for the harm he imagines his country did to others, while carefully excluding himself from any of the criticism.

All for the embrace, physical and otherwise, of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez, of Evo Morales and Danny Ortega. Most of us would say, in word or deed, "insult my country, dude, and you're insulting me, so back off." But this is the kind of fierce pride in home, kith and kin that Barack Obama never knew; he even married a woman who said she never felt love of country until her husband reached the front gate of the White House.

Read the whole thing and perhaps you'll have a better handle on who Obama is and why he does the seemingly incredibly stupid and unpatriotic things he does as President of the United States.

Frankly I gotta say having our first psycopathic president is scaring the heck outa me. Rush Limbaugh essentially says the same thing in this 10-minute interview about Obama's tour.

Palinmania worse than a media conspiracy

Wesley Pruden, editor emeritus at The Washington Times, is an old newspaper man like me, which is why I really liked his comment a week ago about the nastiness of the media campaign toward an amazingly ordinary, genuine hockey mom being attacked so savagely.

Barack Obama accuses John McCain of not "getting it." Sarah Palin says it's Sen. Obama who doesn't "get it." They're all wrong. It's the bloggers, the reporters, the pundits and the rest of the far-flung media that doesn't "get it." It's not the media's fault. There is no media conspiracy, vast or otherwise. The average reporter, correspondent, columnist, pundit or editor couldn't conspire with the entire Harvard Law School faculty to change the oil in his wife's car.

It's worse than a conspiracy. It's a consensus. The newsrooms of the agenda-setting newspapers, the television networks and the newsmagazines have become strongholds of the elites that Barack Obama, he of Harvard Law, insists he is not one of. The young men and women in the newsrooms of flyover country emulate the elites and sometimes dream of one day being one of them.

Once upon a time, we were just "newspapermen" - the word included two sexes, back when there were only two - and we were the sons and daughters of plumbers, firemen, shopkeepers, farmers, cops, steelworkers, over-the-road truckers and a lot of other men of toil and trouble. Most of us were veterans. Some of us were college graduates. Some of us were not. A few of us even went to church on Sunday. When we wrote about ordinary people, we didn't write about them as sociology. We were writing about our friends and our families, and there were hundreds of us across America.

Sarah Palin and her beliefs, her faith, her values, her on-the-job trials and household tribulations would not have seemed odd, or different, or strange to us. Nor would we have been surprised that Sarah Palin would touch the hearts of the Americans of flyover country. That's where we lived, too.

Like Pruden, I spent the huge majority of my working career in newspapers as a writer, photographer and editor. And left-wing idiocy is the “normal” there. There was a light sprinkling of conservatives in years gone by, but like Pruden, me and the dinosaurs, they’re gone.

Obama's Rezko 'Housing Problem'

McCain campaign fires back at Obama's slam about McCain's heiress wife's properties. Do you really want to talk about "housing problems" Obama? The McCain campaign fired back yesterday with the statement below and today with this ad.

"Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses?"

"Does a guy who worries about the price of arugula and thinks regular people 'cling' to guns and religion in the face of economic hardship really want to have a debate about who's in touch with regular Americans?"

Maybe not. Wesley Pruden at the Washington Times gives the rundown on Rezko:

The contretemps may (or may not be) irrelevant to the consideration of presidential qualifications, but it brings to the fore the figure of Tony Rezko, the Chicago fixer who has loomed large in Mr. Obama's life, and who the campaign has worked mightily to keep in the shadows.

Rezko was convicted in June of wire and mail fraud, money laundering and aiding and abetting bribery, nothing in particular to blemish a Chicago pol's reputation, but a reputation-killer everywhere else (excluding New Jersey, Louisiana and Bill Clinton's Hot Springs). Mr. Obama himself has so far not been fingered as accomplice or unindicted anything, but his long association with Rezko and others threatens the story line that he was born in a stable in Bethlehem.

When questions were raised in the past about what he and Rezko did together, and when did they do it, Mr. Obama retreated to bromides about all the good things he has done for little children, cute kittens and adorable puppies. "I've always held myself to the highest ethical standards," he told the Chicago Sun-Times on one occasion when reality seemed to be closing in. "I know what people expect of me." That's enough for his glassy-eyed cult, but it's a story line likely to wilt in the heat and glare of a presidential campaign.

How did he get his house for $300,000 less than the asking price on the same day that Rezko's wife paid the full price to the same seller for a vacant lot next door? Why did he later pay Rezko $104,500 for a 10-foot wide strip of that vacant lot that appraisers had said was worth $40,000?

These are happy coincidences in the Chicago world of Barack Obama, but in the place where the rest of us live who could sell such cheerful explanations?

Tip to the Obama campaign. When you've got a skeleton in the closet, don't open the door and point to it. What the late Casey Stengel said about the fumbling, bumbling newborn N.Y. Mets applies to the Obama campaign, "Doesn't anybody here know how to play this game?"

P.S. How many houses does McCain actually own? Answer, none. All the properties in the family are owned by his wife, the beer baron heiress. Hey, how can you fault a guy who marries a beautiful blonde who owns a beer company? Works for me.